Damien Bona, 56, Oscar Buff Who Became Oscar Scholar

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: February 20, 2012

Flip to just about any page in ''Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards'' and something fascinating is bound to pop up.

In 1997, when ''Breathing Lessons,'' about a man who spent most of his life in an iron lung, won the award for best short documentary, the director, Jessica Yu, stepped to the mike and said, ''You know you've entered new territory when you realize your outfit cost more than your film.''

''This quote,'' the 2002 edition of ''Inside Oscar'' declared, ''immediately went into the annals as one of the all-time great Oscar speeches.''

Not quite like the one in 1931 made by Charles P. Curtis, the vice president of the United States, who was greeted with groans when the audience spotted the thick stack of papers in his hand, which included an extended defense of President Herbert Hoover. No one, according to the book, bothered to tell him that ''he had dropped a number of pages on his way to the podium.''

Damien Bona, who with his college friend Mason Wiley wrote that encyclopedic, usually affectionate but sometimes acerbic work -- now a handy guide for film buffs -- died at 56 in Manhattan on Jan. 29 The cause was cardiac arrest, his brother-in-law, Neil Cohen, said.

''A giddy social history of our place and time, full of statistics and the kind of utterly trivial details that, taken together, somehow assume significance, like centuries-old graffiti scratched onto the base of the Sphinx,'' Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times when the first edition was published in 1986.

It was his mastery of detail that prompted the screenwriter and director Bill Condon (who won and Oscar for ''Gods and Monsters'' in 1999) to consult with Mr. Bona when he produced the 2009 awards ceremony. ''Damien was the first person I called,'' Mr. Condon said on Tuesday. ''He was the perfect sounding board. I don't think anyone has quite captured how both silly and meaningful the Academy Awards are.''

Research like theirs has since ''exploded online,'' Mr. Condon said, contending that Mr. Bona and Mr. Wiley deserve some of the credit: ''Damien and Mason created a culture of Oscar experts and bloggers who now take an obsessive interest in the Academy Awards.''

After Mr. Wiley died in 1994, Mr. Bona updated ''Inside Oscar'' several times. In all, it has sold about 90,000 copies, according to his agent, Lynn Seligman. On his own, Mr. Bona also wrote ''Opening Shots'' (1994), a look at unlikely film debuts, and ''Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan: Hollywood's All-Time Worst Casting Blunders'' (1996).

Damien Conrad Bona was born on March 18, 1955, in Sharon, Conn., and grew up in New Milford, where his father, Arthur, ran a bookstore and his mother, Alma, taught school. Besides his mother, he is survived by his longtime companion, the writer and theater director Ralph Pe?and his sister, Amy Bona.

Mr. Bona and Mr. Wiley met at Columbia, where they both worked on the school newspaper, The Spectator -- Mr. Bona as film critic. After graduating in 1977, he earned a law degree at New York University, then practiced law in the city for a time. But a shared fascination with film led the friends to do several years of research, much of it at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library in Los Angeles. After their book was published, Mr. Bona never again practiced law.

Reporters often sought his historical perspective on the Oscars. In 2003, he was interviewed on CBS's ''Sunday Morning'' about the 75th anniversary of the awards. The first ceremony, the program noted, had been nothing more than a dinner party -- no production numbers, no suspense and with the winners' names printed on the backs of the menus.

''All you'd need to know,'' Mr. Bona said, ''is that the first awards were given out in five minutes.''